Happily Ever After?
by Commander Argus
Summary: It seemed everyone got their fairytale ending.  Was that true for Tara as well?
1. Tara

**_Happily Ever After? Part 1_**

* * *

a/n – In the final chapter of **KP – Cross Country**, the fate of one particular relationship was mentioned in passing. This is her story.

* * *

Tara stared at the computer screen, in particular at the words at the bottom of the page. In reality they were nothing more than black pixels on a light gray background, arranged in a patterns that were called ten point Arial. Those patterns were in turn arranged in just such a way that they had meaning.

At that particular moment, the woman who had become a writer, and a moderately successful one at that, could not grasp the meaning of those words.

…_and they lived happily ever after._

Oh, she knew what they meant, at least to the story she had just finished, or at least it was supposed to end that way. That kind of story always ended that way, it was, like, a rule or something. It didn't matter if it was a terrible cliché, or at least it didn't to her readers. They wanted that ending, or at least she hoped they did. All too soon those six to ten year-old girls would learn more about how the real world worked and they would lose the innocence that came with the age when they could believe in things like a happy ending.

Everyone else seemed to get one, or at least they had by that point. Kim lived about an hour away with her husband Ron, their two-year old son, Ron's little sister and that dark-haired little girl they were pretty much raising as one of their own. Bonnie was living in Go City with that perpetual boyfriend of hers. Hope wasn't with anyone, but she was perfectly happy that way. Even Kim's friend Monique was with the man of her dreams off on the east coast somewhere.

She was supposed to be with the man of her dreams as well.

Saving the final chapter so she could email it to her editor in the morning, she turned the computer off. There were too many happy thoughts in her latest manuscript, and somehow that didn't sit completely right with her at the moment. What was worse was that she knew her mood would show through in her work. Robert was going to catch that and there would be words over the phone, or in the IRC chat channel they used. It was highly likely she would have to rewrite much of the last chapter, if not several coming before it.

It was fine for emotional stress to color a serious, dramatic story. Unfortunately, that was not what her audience was looking for. She wrote stories primarily for little girls. They were couched as light romance stories, but they were actually morality tales to teach them how to live. Her first book had been published by her church, but her talents were quickly recognized and she enjoyed a modest national distribution. Oh, it wasn't like she was about to be the next J.K. Rowling, but she could live comfortably…moderately comfortably…on what she made. It was a living.

Freeing her platinum blonde hair from the baseball cap she wore in her home-office most of the time, she leaned back in the black leather executive chair she occupied almost constantly when she was writing. Her office was a special place, a place where she and she alone would come. It was her private little sanctuary, the one part of the house that was truly hers.

Over the last few months, she was starting to feel like it was the only place she could actually be in that home.

Getting up, she crossed the room over to a neatly arranged bookcase. Other authors she knew had cluttered little offices, covered in notes and other papers. She didn't work that way. Everything in her little space had it's own particular home. That was how she liked it and that was how it stayed. If she had notes, they were neatly arranged into folders that would quickly find their way into the peach-colored file cabinet in the corner. The whole place was as tidy as it could possibly be, and since she did almost all of her writing on the computer, there was little need for paper at all in the place, except what was actually contained in a real book.

If only her mind and her emotions could be tidied up like her office.

She selected a thin volume from the top shelf. It was a first-edition printing of one of her earlier books. The cover was a heavily altered photo of an early-teens girl wearing a princess' dress. It was titled _Darla's Dreams_, and right below the title, written in florid script was her name.

_Tara Matthews-Mankey_.

She finally realized how ironic it was that she insisted that name appear on that particular book. The first nationally published book had her maiden name on it, as it was published only a couple months before her wedding. Her agent had argued long and hard that she should have kept using it as her _nom de plum_, but she would hear nothing of it. Becoming Mrs. Joshua Wendell Mankey had been a dream come true for her at the time, and she was going to show that to the world, or at least to the little girls who read her books and their parents who bought them for them.

Gripping the tome solidly in her tiny hand, she crossed the room back to her desk, setting it firmly in the middle of her crisp, new-looking blotter and opening the middle drawer. Of course, everything inside was just as neatly arrayed as the rest of the room, so it only took her half a moment to find what she was looking for. She gripped the narrow, tapered plastic shaft in both hands and pulled. The black cap snapped cleanly off and she set to work with it.

The fresh, new Sharpie made quick work of the name _Mankey_ on the cover of the book.

A smile creased her face that would have been much more at home on her oldest friend's face instead of hers. Nice girls like her, who always spoke kindly of others, who always played fair with everyone, who waited until their wedding night to know their beloved, they didn't grin like that. It was a grin she only wore in private, in moments when it was perfectly okay, even expected for her to behave that way with her husband.

It wasn't the kind of smile she ever thought she would have after obliterating his name on the cover of a nearly irreplaceable book.

Coolly satisfied with herself, she sat back in the chair once more. The tension spring on the bottom had been dialed back almost as far as it would go so she could lean back in it without having it snap forward roughly under her miniscule weight.

Then she gasped, putting her hand to her mouth.

Kim once told her that things pretty much didn't work out between Josh and herself. In her words, they grew apart.

All that time she had thought that was just her second-oldest friend subconsciously rationalizing the fact her real feelings involved Ron. That made so much sense back then, especially since they did end up together, seemingly forever, a couple months later.

Only Josh hadn't really been growing apart from Kim. He had been growing together with somebody else.

That in itself didn't last, at least then. For reasons known only to the buxom, tanned brunette, Josh didn't fully measure up to the standards her posse were supposed to adhere to, and she had summarily dismissed him as a potential suitor, setting her up instead with Jason Morgan. It took almost another full year for that mistake to be rectified.

In all the intervening years, Tara had never thought of it that way. Her befriending, then dating Josh during his senior and her junior year had seemed natural and appropriate, especially since Kim had been so non-chalant about the whole affair.

Affair was a pretty accurate word for it. Oh, by the standards of her life as it had become by then, it was a pretty innocent thing. The most they did was kiss, but those kisses had come before the real, official breakup of the two. It was before the words "We need to talk" had been spoken by either of them.

In a way, Tara had unwittingly been 'the other woman.'

Now, some years later, she felt…no…she knew that the two of them were growing apart.

If she thought that, then what if history was repeating itself?

So much suddenly became so clear to her.

She didn't stand this time. Instead she simply rolled her chair across the room to the book case. All thoughts of keeping thing neat and tidy pretty much went out the window. She raked every one of the first editions off the top shelf, watching them clatter to the floor, some of their spines cracking, their pages becoming creased as she vented her frustration upon them.

Sliding out of the chair, she sat down on the floor, crossing her legs.

She proceeded to cross out his last name on every one of her books; on the covers, on the spines, even inside. Finally she came to the last one, featuring a hero named Joshua.

With great relish, she went through the entire book, crossing that name out on each page.

* * *

Tara, Josh Mankey and Kim Possible and all other related characters © Disney 


	2. Josh

**_Happily Ever After? Part 2_**

* * *

_There are two sides to every story_.

That was the theme of the painting Josh Mankey was concentrating on. It featured a beautiful young woman in a Victorian dress who looked like she had fallen victim to some unfortunate circumstance. The dress was very slightly torn, her hair disheveled and her face was smudged. Yet, on that face was a faint, wry smile that suggested she might have more to do with her predicament than it would appear at first glance.

Josh sat down on his stool, rubbing his chin with his free hand, forgetting that there was a dab of paint still on his fingers. He was like that when he was producing something that was purely his. When he was working on a commission, he tended to plan every step of the process out and kept both his work area and his person rather neat.

The commission work paid the bills, or at least the bills that Tara's writing didn't take care of. Enough of it came in that he could no longer call himself a 'starving artist.' It was enough that he finally quit his job as the manager of a local drug store to devote himself fully to his artistic career.

His personal projects tended to be hit or miss. He went into them telling himself they were art for art's sake alone, but he found it immensely gratifying when people would crowd into his friend's gallery to see his paintings. It was also quite gratifying when his work actually sold.

Reflecting on his work, he realized that the commissions felt more like selling out to the almighty dollar than when he had worked in the store. Still, he rationalized that doing so actually gave him more time to spend on his personal projects. The reality was that being the manager, he was the one who had to do everything in the store, but in a white shirt and tie instead of a navy polo like the rest of his staff wore. The hours were longer than he liked as well. One time he did the math and realized that he was actually making less per hour than some of his employees.

He had to be grateful, though. For a guy who dropped out of college to attend a local art school, that was just about the only kind of job he was truly qualified for. His garage band never really took off. In fact, the last time they had played together for real was a couple years earlier on the night he proposed to Tara. It turned out to be another expensive dead-end in his life, something that didn't amount to a hill of beans in the long run. Yet the job, which had seen him through school, had paid for his small apartment and later for his share of the little house, was there until his art was enough to support him…

…to support _them_, he had to remind himself.

Josh looked across his studio to the hallway of their modest, three bedroom, one and a half bath ranch style house. Of the three bedrooms, only one had an actual bed in it. The medium sized room had become his studio and the smaller one, the one meant for a child, was Tara's office. The door to that room was closed.

It was always closed.

To him it seemed like, at this point in their lives together, they would be spending as much time together as they could. They were still in the early side of their twenties and financially they were in a good position to start a family.

A family was one of the simple, honest things he expected from their relationship. He kind of figured, knowing her the way he did, that once they exchanged their vows, everything would fall neatly into place. They would spend their honeymoon and a few months beyond just enjoying each other's company. Then the kids would come, or at least that was what the thought would happen. He guessed it was his 'good Catholic' upbringing and, at least until the first year of their marriage, he thought that, even though Tara was raised protestant, that she felt much the same way.

Needless to say, it didn't turn out that way.

Josh Mankey had always thought of himself as an artist first and foremost. Everything else in his life, save his relationship with his wife, was subordinate to that end. The work he had done was to make a living, now his work was his life. He was utterly shocked, however, when it turned out to be Tara who would stay up late at night, staring at her computer screen, typing until all hours. It was just her children's books either. Like most writers, she wanted something beyond her normal bread and butter. She wanted to be a novelist. She wanted to put something out that was at least two inches thick and would be on the New York Times bestseller list. Her desire for that was so great she sometimes bumped up against deadlines for her paid work.

That Josh could understand. Her novel was, like the painting currently residing on his easel, art for it's own sake, and the other was simply a means to an end to support that all-encompassing project.

The only problem was, while Josh felt his artistic life and life as a husband were equal partners in his mind, Tara didn't see her own world that way. It seemed, at times, that he was like so much else in her life. Something necessary and comfortable shoved into the background while she pursued her dream. There were times when he felt she was married to that stupid computer instead of him. It sure seemed she spent the better part of her nights with it than him.

Somehow he couldn't keep a certain phrase out of his mind. _Growing Apart_. That's how Kim Possible described it when they 'broke up.' It just seemed so strange to him to think of it that way. They didn't really break up, because they never really were that together. Neither had ever said the words "Do you want to be my girl/boyfriend?" They were dating in the most technical sense, in that, from time to time, they went out on a date. Actually, the dating part was doing its proper job. For a long time he had been attracted to the strong, independent young woman he saw on TV and around the school, only to find out, when they were together, she transformed into the same giggling, moon-struck girl that every other woman his age seemed to be. It wasn't so much that they grew apart, as they finally recognized that neither was what the other was truly looking for in life. That, and it really was just a few fun dates during high school. As Kim would say, "No big."

Yet that seemed to be exactly what was happening between him and his wife. The first year had seemed so much like an extended honeymoon, at least when the two of them could find the time. It was nice to come home to her open arms each night when the store closed. She may have insisted that certain things would wait until they were wed, but that did not mean she didn't enjoy those things fully. She could be wild at times, wilder than he actually imagined.

More and more, though, instead of finding her in their room, ready to enjoy his company before they went to sleep, she was behind that door. What was worse was he didn't know exactly what she was doing. If she was working on her girl's stories, he would often see some of the early drafts. She valued his input, though he found a lot of it intensely boring to his male sensibilities. Still, he could value the artistic merits and sometimes had something constructive to say.

Her 'novel' was something else entirely. Part of the reason she did not like to be disturbed when she was in there was that nobody but her was going to see it until it was ready for the world. It had not been to her editor, nor to her agent. It resided solely on her hard-drive and whatever backup media she employed. It was almost to the point he wondered if there actually was anything there, as if she only used that as an excuse to be alone for whatever reason. He really didn't think that was the case, but he also could not understand how somebody could pour so much time and effort into something, only to let it languish unseen and unloved.

He put his brush down, realizing he had reached a wall that night. Perhaps later, once he had settled down in the den with a beer (the same expensive, imported Lager he once discovered in James Possible's garage refrigerator) he would be inspired to work on it further, but for the moment he was only wasting time considering something he just couldn't put his finger on.

Josh glanced at the door to Tara's office again, wishing she would come out so they could retire to the bedroom. It had been some time since they were together and he thought it would be a good time for that. Yet he could not bring himself to knock on that door.

Sadly, he shut the door and headed to the bathroom, leaving a single light on over his painting. He often left that one light on, so he could see his work first thing when he returned to it. He would never put it away until he felt it was finished, whether he had to go to his paying projects or not. It would be a while before that one was ready. There was something just not completely right about it, though he couldn't put his finger on it.

Perhaps it was because he was seeing it as he thought it should be, but he had not noticed something about the woman in the painting. She had dark hair and blue eyes, but as for the rest of her, the slender feathers, the round face, she looked like somebody else.

Somebody not Tara.

Somebody he thought he had grown apart from many years before.

* * *

Tara, Josh Mankey and Kim Possible and all other related characters © Disney 


End file.
